Days go by, and it’s time for your one-to-one meeting, and there’s no agenda set.

Rather, your agenda items are spread out between hundreds of messages across multiple communication tools.

During the meeting, you spend about 15 minutes going through your messages to understand what it is you’d both like to talk about.

The WiFi cuts out and it takes you 5 more minutes to get back on the call.

You just wasted 20 minutes of your 30 minute one-to-one.

The role of agendas in Slack and Microsoft Teams

The heart of every successful one-to-one meeting is the agenda. It allows both individuals to come prepared, and spend time making decisions as opposed to sharing context.

For remote managers, making sure that every meeting is an effective use of everyone’s time is extremely important because you don’t have the luxury of sitting in front of your employee for 8 hours a day.

Remote workers also have to factor in things like technical difficulties, coordinating different time zones and communicating through multiple tools.

If you’re running your one-to-ones in Slack or Microsoft Teams, there’s no reason that they can’t be as effective as an in-person meeting.

Why remote managers need a shared agenda for one-to-one meetings

Juggling day-to-day responsibilities while managing a team is already hard enough.

Don’t make things harder for yourself by wasting time in unproductive meetings (and as a result, filling up your calendar with even more meetings to make up for it).

Here are 4 ways a shared agenda will improve your one-to-ones:

Direct reports contribute more to the conversation

A shared agenda is just that… shared.

When you and your direct reports have ownership of the meeting, one-to-ones move away from being a one-sided conversation to a two-way dialogue.

On top of that, a shared agenda allows you and your direct reports to better prepare for the meeting.

If you want to discuss a certain project or topic, add it to the agenda prior to the meeting to give your direct reports ample time to reflect and come with a prepared answer (without feeling like they’ve been put on the spot).

Less time is wasted during one-to-ones

You don’t want to waste your direct report’s time and they certainly don’t want to waste yours.

Spending half of your meeting scrolling through the different communication tools and docs your team is using is not the best use of anyone’s time.

Having one place where all of your talking points live will help both of you stay on task and remove distractions.

Cover the topics you actually need to cover

As a remote manager, it’s likely that you and your team have jam-packed one-to-one meetings.

In most cases, this is because remote workers don’t have the same opportunities to casually discuss small things in the office with their managers.

“In a remote team, where you can’t just chat waiting while the coffee machine has blue-screened and is rebooting, it’s really important to maintain these relationship channels on a regular basis.”

Shared agendas for meetings in Microsoft Teams

Creating a shared agenda in Microsoft Teams is a similar experience to using Slack.

You can take the sameapproach mentioned earlier – by privately messaging your employees and jotting down a quick list of items you want to cover in your agenda, which also comes with the same considerations as Slack (i.e. meeting ownership).

Once you know exactly what you want to talk about, use Microsoft Teams’ native integration with Outlook to schedule your conference by clicking on the meetings icon.

One of the best ways to get the most out of meetings in Teams is to learn how to use shortcuts in your command bar.

It’ll save you some serious time when it comes to finding the information you want to address in your meeting.

For instance, type:

/files to pull up the recent documents you’ve shared with your team to prepare for the meeting

/call followed by the first few letters of an employee’s name to quickly add new people to the meeting if you want to transform your one-to-one into a conference

/saved to pull up saved messages that are relevant to the meeting

Need to come back and review your meeting later?

No problem.

With Microsoft Teams, you can record your meeting audio, video, and screen sharing activities, and store them in the cloud on Stream.

The record feature means that you can easily access past meetings to refer back to past conversations However, it also means that you’ve got a great resource you can use to follow up on the meeting by:

Creating department or company announcements based on your one-to-one discussion

Following up on employee performance with stand-up sessions

Just click on the “…” button on your meeting screen and hit record to save your content.